I think I bought more albums this year than any previously, but still I find it difficult narrowing down choices and putting them in any kind of order. I’ve decided on 10 though, and they’re in some kind of order. So here’s the list, followed by a rambling summary of my musical year:
- Saturdays=Youth / M83
- Santogold / Santogold
- Dear Science / TV on the Radio
- London Zoo / The Bug
- Vampire Weekend / Vampire Weekend
- Made in the Dark / Hot Chip
- Donkey / CSS
- Crystal Castles / Crystal Castles
- Midnight Boom / The Kills
- At Mount Zoomer / Wolf Parade
I’ve put together a Spotify playlist containing songs from each of the artists. I’ve used ones from this year’s albums where I could, but they’re not all on there so I had to use older ones.
I find it interesting that the two bands I was most fond of in the first quarter of this year, Blood Red Shoes and Foals, haven’t featured in my listening as time has passed. I still like their albums but they just haven’t remained exciting for me in the way that others have done.
By releasing Ghosts (well, part of it) and The Slip for free I listened to more Nine Inch Nails this year than I would have done previously (I bought the full Ghosts album recently as well). Sigur Ros and Bloc Party both gave access to downloads in advance of their CDs being sent out (providing you bought the album) which was a good move in my eyes, more bands/stores should follow their lead - allowing me quicker access to the music while still being able to fulfill my craving for shiny, physical media. Being the kind of person who likes shiny versions of things, I went for the special edition of the Sigur Ros album which got me DVDs, a couple of slides from the film of the video and a lovely fabric-bound book full of photos with a list of names of buyers at the back, which I appreciated.
Girl Talk, with Feed the Animals, went for the “Name your price” model for download with $10 getting you a physical CD a few months later. I paid a couple of quid for the download and had every intention of going back for a CD if I liked it and while I did think the album was a lot of fun I did get a little bored with it after a while, so I ended up buying one of his previous CDs instead.
I’ve mentioned his album a couple of times here, but worthy of more mention is the guy behind Brad Sucks. In September he released his second album, Out of It, offering free downloads of the MP3s as well as the source files and a name-your-price (+shipping) for the CD. It’s a really good album, well worth paying for, but if nothing else give it a listen for free and pass on the recommendation if you like it.
The last part of this year saw the launch over here of Spotify (previously) and I’m still impressed with it. They have more than one advert now, which is an improvement, but I still wonder if they’ll be able to make enough (or continue to make enough) money to keep the advert frequency low enough that it doesn’t annoy people too much - I still don’t think I’d pay monthly for it.
I’m still a fan of Last.Fm and they had a pretty big revamp this year launching a new interface and features alongside the ability to listen to loads of songs from their site. I still like it most for keeping up with what friends are listening to and looking at the pretty graphs that my listening habits make (it’s apparent I sometimes get a little bit carried away listening to one artist, and then end up getting a bored of them) but the radio and on-demand songs are still good, they just don’t fit in that well with how (and where) I generally listen to music.
One of the best bits of Last.Fm though is how easily it lets other people do cool stuff with the data. I’ve used LastGraph but going back now reveals they have a load of extra ways of displaying the data. The best feature though, in my opinion, is still their posters that show listening habits over time - here’s one showing mine for this year (1.7MB PDF).
